SOURCE: "The Later Poetry of Judith Wright," in Southerly, Vol. 25, No. 3, 1965, pp. 163–71.

[Here, Wilkes defends Wright's third and fourth volumes of poetry, The Gateway and The Two Fires, contending that the two collections represent an expansion in Wright's poetry, an attempt "to reach beyond the immediate experience, to probe its significance. " Additionally, Wilkes examines the significance of two later collections, Birds and Five Senses, in Wright's body of work.]

The Recognition so quickly won by Judith Wright's early work, in The Moving Image (1946) and Woman to Man (1949), has proved strangely prejudicial to her later verse. The Moving Image was a volume in which sense perceptions were held and explored, the titles of the poems reading like a series of talismans—"Trapped Dingo", "Bullocky", "The Surfer", "Nigger's Leap: New England"— and their impact coming from the sheer individuality of perception:

South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter;
low trees blue-leaved and olive; outcropping granite—
clean, lean, hungry country.

The same immediacy and vitality was felt in the lyrical poetry of her second book, in the set of love poems on the woman, the man and the unborn child—"the third who lay in our embrace".

The collections that followed, The Gateway (1953) and The Two Fires (1955), were received with less enthusiasm, if not with positive misgivings at the "increasing impersonality" of Judith Wright's work, its movement towards the general and the abstract. To the reader who valued The Moving Image and Woman to Man, The Gateway could well seem like a collection of the poems rejected from those earlier books. Criticism of the later verse in general has been influenced by an assumption that Judith Wright was still trying to write the kind of poetry she had written before, but was now failing in the attempt. I should argue, to the contrary, that in The Gateway and Two Fires she is attempting poetry of another kind.

It had been clear in The Moving Image itself that Judith Wright was not content merely to write poems of observation, however acute and sensitive: there had been a constant effort to reach beyond the immediate experience, to probe its significance. This effort was felt in the strained endings of "The Surfer" and "Bullocky", in the forcing of the Homeric parallel in "Trapped Dingo"; it was felt also in the title-poem in the attempt at a large philosophical pronouncement on Time, as "a moving image of eternity". Woman to Man, interpreted in the light of its epigraph, upheld love ("the summary or collective law of nature … imposed by God upon the original particles of all things") as a counter to the destructiveness of Time, a force of renewal and regeneration. The tendencies pursued in the later verse are tendencies present from the beginning, but they confront Judith Wright with dilemmas that compel a departure from her earlier manner.

The surface change—the one repeatedly noted—is that the world as perceived, hitherto the main source of her poetic inspiration, ceases to dominate her field of vision. Instead it offers now a starting-point for reflection, as in "Phaius Orchid"; or a symbolic situation to be explored, as in "The Pool and the Star"; or it is translated from literal reality into a sphere of imagination and dream, as in "Lion". A poem like "The Cycads" in Woman to Man already indicates the change. The trees are seen as enduring through the centuries, surviving generation after generation of other forms of life:

Only the antique cycads sullenly
keep the old bargain life has long since broken:
and, cursed by age, through each chill century
they watch the shrunken moon, but never die,

for time forgets the promise he once made,
and change forgets that they are left alone.
Among the complicated birds and flowers
they seem a generation carved in stone

but the cycads are not here "observed" as they would have been in The Moving Image. The reader could not learn from the poem that cycads are palm-like, or discover much else of their physical appearance as Macrozamia. The cycads figure only as part of the reverie of the poet, as a symbol of time itself:

Leaning together, down those gulfs they stare
over whose darkness dance the brilliant birds
that cry in air one moment, and are gone;
and with their countless suns the years spin on.

Take their cold seed and set it in the mind,
and its slow root will lengthen deep and deep
till, following, you cling on the last ledge
over the unthinkable, unfathomed edge
beyond which man remembers only sleep.

From The Gateway onward, individual poems gain from their relationship to one another, and to the total movement of which they are part. It is significant that the epigraph to The Gateway is taken from Blake (while a later poem is addressed to Traherne), and that of the Australian poets whom Judith Wright has studied, she has written most perceptively of John Shaw Neilson. It is not so much that her poetry is losing its grasp on the actual world; it is rather that the instinct she possessed from the outset, to press towards the underlying significance of a given experience, is becoming more searching and insistent. A possible access to Judith Wright's later verse lies through the concept of the "two lives", to which she herself referred in discussing the poetry of Chris Brennan. He gave his own formulation of it in his lectures on symbolism in 1904 [published in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, 1965]:

There are, as most of us keenly feel, two lives: that lies in the brightness of truth, this stumbles in error; that is radiant with love and beauty, this is vexed with its own littleness and meanness; that is unfettered, lying beyond good and evil, this is caught in the quagmire … Poetry, mediating between the two, necessarily enters into the conflict… its part is both to exasperate and reconcile that war.

Judith Wright's earlier poetry had been established in one world, the finite world available to the senses, and had drawn its strength from the clarity and vitality of her sense perceptions. The effort of the later poetry is to reach beyond that world—an effort that is always arduous and most often frustrated, but that leads Judith Wright into regions unexplored before. In The Gateway and Two Fires the contingent world has become both an earnest of the ideal world and a denial of it, at times a prison and at times a means of release.

Thematically the most instructive of these later poems is "The Gateway" itself, which takes up the conception of the journey developed also in "The Lost Man" and Traveller and the Angel". Through the gateway lies the land where the contingent world falls away and the self is the "sole reality"; the way leads on until the path itself vanishes and the self is dissolved in turn—then from nothingness, it is remade:

To say that I recall that time,
that country,
would be a lie; time was not,
and I nowhere.
Yet two things remain—
one was the last surrender,
the other the last peace.
In the depths of nothing
I found my home.

All ended there,
yet all began.
All sank in dissolution
and rose renewed.

This is the only poem in which the transition from the one world to the other is completed, and then only at the level of descriptive statement. The other poems in The Gateway remain fixed in the world of time, where the only renewal offered is a rebirth into the natural cycle, as presented so painfully in "The Cicadas":

Terrible is the pressure of light into the heart.
The womb is withered and cracked, the birth is begun,
and shuddering and groaning to break that iron grasp
the new is delivered as the old is torn apart …

Spring, bringing new life, is resented in "The Cedars" as confirming the bondage to the processes of time:

Spring, returner, knocker at the iron gates,
why should you return? None wish to live again …

For it is anguish to be reborn and reborn:
at every return of the overmastering season
to shed our lives in pain, to waken into the cold …

The natural world is seen here as a prison, mocking efforts to escape from it. At other times, in its obedience to its own law, it possesses a harmony and Tightness that by contrast prove a torment to the divided self. This is an idea touched on in "The Flame Tree"

How to live, I said, as the flame-tree lives?
To know what the flame-tree knows—to be
prodigal of my life as that wild tree
and wear my passion so?

and developed in "Birds":

Whatever the bird does is right for the bird to do—
cruel kestrel dividing in his hunger the sky,
thrush in the trembling dew beginning to sing,
parrot clinging and quarrelling and veiling his queer eye—
all these are as birds are and good for birds to do.
But I am torn and beleaguered by my own people.
The blood that feeds my heart is the blood they gave me,
and my heart is the house where they gather and fight for dominion—
all different, all with a wish and a will to save me,
to turn me into the ways of other people.

At other moments again, the world is seen with the particularity characteristic of The Moving Image, but with the difference that its beauty now symbolises the plight of existence subject to time. For whom does the phaius orchid flower? For the lizards and the ants merely, in a purposeless splendour?

Out of the brackish sand
see the phaius orchid build
her intricate moonlight tower
that rusts away in flower.

For whose eyes—for whose eyes
does this blind being weave
sand's poverty, water's sour,
the white and black of the hour

into the image I hold
and cannot understand?
Is it for the ants, the bees,
the lizard outside his cave,

or is it to garland time—
eternity's cold tool
that severs with its blade
the gift as soon as made?

These later poems betray an increasing consciousness of dualities that refuse to be resolved into singleness—the duality of life in time and life beyond it, of disorder and harmony, of flesh and spirit, of reason and unreason. This motif persists in The Two Fires (1955), perhaps giving more identity to the collection than its declared theme, mankind threatened by the atomic bomb. There is a recurring sense of the poet trying to scrutinise her own mental processes ("Flesh"), being baffled in a conscious search for what should come effortlessly ("The Man Beneath the Tree"), or finding in the outside world ("Nameless Flower", "Gum-trees Stripping") modes of existence whose simplicity and completeness humble the ego. Although a poem like "The Man Beneath the Tree" so strongly recalls Shaw Neilson, this is not to suggest that Judith Wright is a mystic—though perhaps she might wish that she were. From the time of Woman to Man at least, she has been especially concerned with the role of the poet, the poet as "The Maker"—

All things that glow and move,
all things that change and pass,
I gather their delight
as in a burning-glass;

all things I focus in
the crystal of my sense.
I give them breath and life
and set them free in the dance

and in The Two Fires the emphasis falls more strongly on the poet's power to impose coherence on the disorder of the world. In "For Precision", his role is defined in a way that would put an end to the sense of duality haunting Judith Wright's work:

In "forming into one chord / what's separate and distracted", the poet may establish a moment of harmony, transcend—if only for an instant—the world of flux and the sense of the divided self. The enigmatic piece "The Cup" fixes on silence as a state or quality that is likewise isolated from the conflict; "Song" presents the dance as another symbol of transcendence, recalling Yeats.

Yet the poem that concludes The Two Fires reproduces most painfully the dilemma that all Judith Wright's later verse has sought to escape. "The Harp and the King" insists on the captivity of human life in time. The old king is frightened and despairing, calling the harp to comfort him as he feels "night and the soul's terror coming on":

The world's a traitor to the self-betrayed;
but once I thought there was a truth in time,
while now my terror is eternity.
So do not take me outside time.
Make me believe in my mortality,
since that is all I have, the old king said.

The harp replies that time offers "aching drought" and resurgent fertility, suffering and failure followed by "incredible redemptions"—and yet is finally comfortless, unless it be transcended:

This is the praise of time, the harp cried out—
that we betray all truths that we possess.
Time strips the soul and leaves it comfortless
and sends it thirsty through a bone-white drought.
Time's subtler treacheries teach us to betray.
What else could drive us on our way?
Wounded we cross the desert's emptiness
and must be false to what would make us whole.
For only change and distance shape for us
some new tremendous symbol for the soul.

While the theoretical scheme of the poem asserts the possibility of transcendence or release, this is eclipsed in the stronger feeling of compulsive bondage to time.

After The Two Fires there was an interval of seven years before Judith Wright published another collection. On its appearance, Birds (1962) seemed something of an interlude in her career. The delicacy of perception in "Dotterel" and "Parrots" would seem like a return to the mode of The Moving Image, except that this is a talent she has had always at command, like the gift for the "character" poem seen from "Remittance Man" to "Old House" to "Bachelor Uncle". At the same time a poem like "Eggs and Nestlings" reveals that the cruel contrast of the "two lives" can make itself felt even here:

The moss-rose and the palings made
a solemn and a waiting shade
where eagerly the mother pressed
a sheltering curve into her nest.

Her tranced eye, her softened stare,
warned me when I saw her there,
and perfect as the grey nest's round,
three fail and powdered eggs I found.

My mother called me there one day.
Beneath the nest the eggshells lay,
and in it throbbed the triple greed
of one incessant angry need.

Those yellow gapes, those starveling cries,
how they disquieted my eyes!—
the shapeless furies come to be
from shape's most pure serenity.

Birds was followed in 1963 by Five Senses, Judith Wright's choice from all her previously published work, with the addition of the new series "The Forest". The sense of continuing search is stressed in the poem of this title: although over the years the strangeness of the forest has been subdued into the named and known, still

My search is further.
There's still to name and know
beyond the flowers I gather
that one that does not wither—
the truth from which they grow.

Many of the poems assembled in "The Forest" were first published in the 1950's, and this series does not so much advance the search as confer a symmetry on it. There is even a suggestion that it is becoming stylised, as poems like "Interplay", "The Lake", "Double Image" and "Vision" seem to rely on a depersonalised introspection, an oracular manner, and references to love as an absolute. The originality of Judith Wright's talent is not in question, as "For My Daughter" is enough to show, or a more recent poem like "Typists in the Phoenix Building" (Quadrant 26, 1963) which she has chosen not to include. The poems she has included in "The Forest" contribute to the unity of Five Senses, as a determination of her work up to 1963. The title itself is significant, as drawn from a poem published seven years earlier, and perhaps defining the aspiration behind her verse since that time. "Five Senses" describes the effort to win "shape's most pure serenity" from an incoherent and imperfect world, through the creative activity of the poet:

Now my five senses
gather into a meaning
all acts, all presences;
and as a lily gathers
the elements together,
in me this dark and shining,
that stillness and that moving,
these shapes that spring from nothing,
become a rhythm that dances,
a pure design

while the poet's activity in turn is guided by something beyond his knowing, so that the poem at once embodies the union of his creative mind and the world outside it, and yet forms a reality transcending them both:

While I'm in my five senses
they send me spinning
all sounds and silences,
all shape and colour
as thread for that weaver,
whose web within me growing
follows beyond my knowing
some pattern sprung from nothing—
a rhythm that dances
and is not mine.

At such moments—and poems as early as "Wonga Vine" are their record—the "two lives" become one.